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Comment by headShrinker | Hacker News Reader

Funny how you mention all the things the 'left' is doing while omitting an actual coup d'état where more than a few people died. "Bringing the country together" is only possible when the extremist no longer have the loudest voice.

I'm not on board with all the virtue signaling coming from tech and the left, but you lost me at 4 years of continuous lies and storming the capital.

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However, the other take on this is that half the country is unhappy enough that it culminated in storming the Capitol. Sure, they may not look very presentable or act very civilized. But they have numbers, power, and anger. Sweeping this fact under the rug is not going to help.

This is what I don't get about these discussions. Any time someone says "the liberals are not interested in uniting the country" someone comes back with "but these people are rednecks and they are bad!" They are still part of the same country (for now) and if it is to stay a country the leadership is going to have to figure out how to talk to them. Because the process by which these people become not part of the same country anymore is called civil war.

OK, so the question is why? The proximate cause is that they were told, baselessly, from all sides of their media bubble, that the election was stolen. Many of the rioters also were followers of a bizarre conspiracy theory/alternate reality game that tells them that this is all part of a giant master plan.

The media and political environment has not been serving its function of properly informing citizens so that they can make informed voting choices, and so you have people trying to overthrow the government based on lies.

Now, not everything people believed in the pre-internet media environment was factual either, but there was rough agreement as to consensus reality. Even in the last contested election, the 2000 one, people roughly agreed on the basic facts (butterfly ballots, hanging chads, etc), even if they didn't agree on what should be done about it.

I don't have a solution for this problem, but it is a very serious one.

People tend to fall for conspiracy theories and charlatans when they are desperate. We call a large swath of the country "flyover states". These people feel like what they are doing is the only way to make themselves heard. We respond by doing more to silence them. This is not going to end well.

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